


The Master and His Knights

by bluntblade



Series: Tales from the Timeskip [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Custom Knights of Ren, Female Knight of Ren, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, Not Canon Compliant - Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, The Knights of Ren were Luke's Apprentices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:35:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27760858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluntblade/pseuds/bluntblade
Summary: During a pilgrimage to recover a Dark Side artefact, Kylo Ren reflects on the origins of the dark brotherhood he leads.
Relationships: Knights of Ren & Kylo Ren, Kylo Ren & Luke Skywalker
Series: Tales from the Timeskip [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1719019
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	The Master and His Knights

Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader, stalks across a field of ash and burnt bone, his Knights moving in his wake. To either side, the barren plain stretches out to the horizon.

Ahead of them looms a tower. A jagged ruin, a thing of pitted and rusted iron. Here and there, the weak yellow sunlight catches a graven image. Ren knows these from pouring over his uncle's old books, years before. These are the symbols of the Kemazad, a Dark Jedi cult long lost to history.

The Sith were among the first adherents of the Dark Side, and by far the most powerful until their end. But they were never the only ones - old Snoke was proof enough of that. And Kylo Ren is not fussy about where he gets his advantages from. He will happily take what the Kemazad have left.

Bones, old bones, break under his armoured boots. Ren is likely the first being to tread this ground since the Kemazad were brought to battle here and destroyed. It’s not certain who did it; the Jedi seem like the likeliest candidates, but some texts suggest the Witches of Dathomir or the Mandolorians. The intrigues of the Sith too might have some part in what happened here. The proof has not remained, the victors taking their dead and leaving the vanquished to their desolate grave.

Ren’s mind turns elsewhere. As he walks, he looks upon his dark retinue and his thoughts travel back to a time before they were the Knights of Ren.

For they were not always so. Once they went by different names, just as their master was once Ben Solo.

The thought resists being held in one’s head, that these pitiless killers were once children. Even for their master, the one who lived with them for so long and then turned them into his creatures at Snoke’s bidding.

Closest to him are Yimur and Gwaelyn, his right hand and his left. Yimur carries his sword in both hands, never letting his guard drop in unfamiliar terrain. Gwaelyn moves with her glaive held a little behind her, the blade hovering by her ankle, but she too scans the horizon.

The boy who Yimur once was tended towards caution and suspicion. His home had made him that way. He was the son of a bleak, primitive world, versed in bladework and cognisant of his connection to the Force long before he saw a blaster or a holograph.

Luke Skywalker and one of his fellow Jedi - Ezra Bridger, Ren recalls - had followed a slaver’s rumour to the youth. Finding him had been a part of Skywalker's decision to raise a proper temple, rather than just make Ben his own sole apprentice.

The youth had made friends slowly, except for where Ben Solo was concerned. He gravitated to the other silent boy, seeing an echo of himself. Ben had been a confidante to him, shielding the “savage” from the taunts of the others. It earned him a solid ally. And for his constancy, the youth’s reward had been to hear of Ben’s worries, his doubts about his master. Perhaps he began to share them.

Certainly, Ren doesn’t recall any doubt on the night that the temple burned. The first of their peers to die had done so with Yimur’s lightsaber through his chest.

A three-eyed skull stares back with empty sockets as Nazur takes it up. He contemplates it, perhaps pondering its origins as Ren does from a distance. Species indeterminate, possibly mutated.

The moment only lasts a few seconds before he adjusts the grip of his armoured gauntlet and crushes a hemisphere to powder and splinters. What's left of the desecrated skull drops to the dirt and is ground formless by the Knight’s boot.

No one would be surprised to hear that the apprentice who became Nazur Ren was another student who worried his teachers. Luke had done his best to steer the boy away from his worst impulses, right down to teaching him saber styles which emphasised calm and defensiveness. The efficacy of those steps, however, was limited.

Once, Luke had confided to Ben that he wondered if the boy had it in him to be a Jedi. Ben he didn’t doubt - if he could just work past a few things, Skywalker said. But the other boy…

“It’s natural to feel satisfaction in victory,” he had said. “Even the death of a foe, if they are foul enough. But we should never _revel_ in the death of another, much less…”

Ben had looked at him quizzically. “What, Uncle?”

Ren recalls a heavy frown on his uncle’s face. “The infliction of pain. I’ve seen it in the way he fights. There’s cruelty there.”

His uncle, Ren now thinks, had barely glimpsed the tip of the iceberg.

In contrast, the viciousness of the apprentice who became Verix Ren wasn't at all perceptible back then. That student had been the child of a rarefied society, one which cultivated artistry in every walk of life, every pursuit. The apprentice Skywalker gained from that world had brought the same attitude to the Jedi arts, especially bladesmanship. Except for a certain amount of quiet egotism, he had made for a diligent student.

Something about that devotion to artistry curdled after the temple burned. Or perhaps it happened that night. Having recognised Ben Solo as one he could learn from and measure himself against, the apprentice took his side in the fight. His first kill had been a beautiful one, his saber moving in a ribbon of light as it took one hand, then the other, then choked off the victim’s scream with a slash across the throat.

That, Ren suspects, was the tipping point. In that moment, the future Verix had seen something which had been missing in his bladework - its very purpose, to take lives.

Now he watches as Verix finds a blackened skeleton propped up against a rock. Its owner died screaming with a lightsaber through his heart, and the jaws have remained agape in that howl for centuries or longer. Verix circles the rock, inspecting it from all angles. Then one of his hookblades flashes and the skeleton’s cranium flies clear. The rest of the skull follows with a helping backhand blow, and the skeleton sags to the ground.

After that first kill, the artist had stalked through the burning temple, fixated on slaying. In the months afterwards, as Snoke moulded his new servants, he had cultivated all their darker traits. In Verix’s case, quiet pride was twisted into sneering arrogance to match his latent sadism.

The hideous riktus sneer of Verix’s mask, Ren knows, matches the expression beneath. It always does.

Krobakh, now the quietest of the Knights, screamed louder than any of his fellows when they attempted to bleed their Kyber crystals, to make them worthy weapons of Snoke’s favoured warriors. An act of consecration on the part of the former Padawans, sealing their adherence to the Dark Side. A doomed attempt for all of them save for one, the crystals rebelling against the attempt to corrupt them until they disintegrated entirely.

Ren recalls the tortured darkness of the vault where Snoke set them to the task, the storm of light and sound which swept through it as the Kyber crystals resisted and ultimately perished. Even the one surviving crystal - his - was marked by that tumult, rendered unstable by the bleeding process and necessitating his saber’s crossguard vents.

One day, when the pace of the war slackens and his enemies are destroyed, they will acquire new crystals and forge new, better weapons. For now, Ren considers his quiet brother, who ever marches close by, and ponders that Krobakh might best embody what the Ren does to those it flows through.

It cores them, hollows them as it strips out any moral weakness to make killing instruments of people. Perhaps in time the others will follow, perhaps there was simply more residual weakness in the boy who became Krobakh. What is left is dogged loyalty to his master and brutal killing instinct. The Ren demands that its adherents burn and slay, as does Kylo Ren, and Krobakh grants those demands.

Gwaelyn, even though she stalks almost as close to Kylo as Yimur, seems to move ever apart from the others. Her flowing grace differentiates her even before one registers her slender, obviously female figure.

She is at once both deeply reminiscent of and a far cry from the young woman she once was. Her ash-blonde hair, hidden by the helmet and cowl, has little of the lustre it used to possess. Her beauty has taken on a consumptive edge, corpse-pale skin stretched tight across bone. With her deadly, balletic grace, she is every bit as much of an embodiment of death as the stolid Krobakh.

Ren remembers when she was vibrant indeed. Certainly she was vivacious enough to claim a few kisses from Ben Solo - Skywalker might set limits, but he and his fellow tutors had not been especially strict with their pupils in that particular regard. It might have been a matter of doctrine, making a clean break from old edicts. Then again, perhaps the masters had simply thought it expedient not to pit themselves against hormones.

Ben, with his brooding good looks and impressive build, had been a favourite among the girls in the temple. That he was quiet and often seemed troubled, for quite a few of them, had only added to that appeal.

For all that, only one of the girls took his side when the temple burned. The rest recoiled from the haunted, rage-filled figure of Ben Solo that night. Then they went for their lightsabers, and paid for their mistake.

Torlun moves at the margins of the pack, scanning the area. His scimitar stays in its scabbard. His handcannon tracks in sync with his unseen eyes.

Perhaps ironically, Torlun bears the greatest resemblance to his old self; a boy who Master Amrahn Gazhul sought out and took in on Skywalker's orders. That youth was found on Nar Shadda, serving a gutter mob as a solitary assassin. Gazhul had seen potential, and a soul to save, cutting a swathe through the vicious gang who had enslaved the boy.

Saved he may have been, but the youth was never free of suspicion from many of his fellow students. Unsurprising, perhaps - a number of them had killed before they were taken in, but there was something _different_ about an assassin.

A few of the other apprentices had made their feelings known on the matter. There had been an altercation, and it was Ben Solo who had stepped in and left the aggressors flat on their backs. After that, the ex-ganger had been a near-constant companion of his, but he had never warmed to most of his fellows.

Perhaps, had they found it in their hearts to trust and welcome him, things might have gone differently that night. Then again, perhaps not.

Every apprentice who took Skywalker’s side that night perished, but that was not to say that they had all gone down easily. They were, after all, two groups of confused and frantic students pitted against one another. Most of the Knights carry scars from the vicious melee. If one looks into the lenses of Nagai Ren’s helmet, a faint red glow reveals itself in the place of one eye.

That eye had been lost to a fellow apprentice. The teachers hadn’t engaged with lethal intent at first, still wanting to believe that this had all been a terrible accident or misunderstanding - still thinking that things could be made right. Some of the padawans had understood the truth more quickly, especially one or two who had envied Ben Solo and hadn’t been quiet about it.

Four of them had come at him with sabers drawn, early in the fight. He’d engaged two, but the third and fourth would have had him, had Nagai not interposed himself. Even as he batted one blade down, the other slashed his face. The scream had echoed through the temple.

The eye had been a sacrifice for his friend. Not the last such sacrifice that he would make - nor the last that any of them would make, for that matter.

The Knights halt at the gates. It’s a matter of deference, not fear, that keeps them back, though Torlun is sure to scope what he can see of the chamber. But it’s not a visual which prompts him to regard his master warily as he nears the threshold.

The change in the Knights’ posture is immediate. Limbs tense, gauntleted hands tighten on their weapons. And around them, the Ren uncoils like a waking beast.

Kylo turns fractionally towards Torlun and nods. “I sense it.”

Yimur draws level with him, sword held en garde. “We advance?”

“Yes.” Ren has his saber in his hand, but does not yet ignite it. “We take the initiative.”

His telekinetic powers were always his greatest talent. He seems to share that with Rey – and the mere thought of her makes his anger surge like magma. The aged metal screeches and the gate is torn open.

Out of the dark comes a roar, so guttural that it sounds almost like rock dragged over gravel, except for the disgustingly organic edge to it. The beast which gives this bellow sounds as though it’s tearing its own throat to make the noise.

What emerges from the darkness is a tower of bone plates and spines, stalking on six sharp-jointed legs. Its angular boulder of a head is dominated by gnarled, curling horns and a mouth of jagged teeth as long as Ren’s arm. A Sryvast, a rare but surpassingly deadly creature.

“So,” Verix begins. “What do you suppose we do with this creature?” The Knights’ blades sizzle into life.

Ren looks into the blood-red eyes of the creature. It is, he knows, a beast whose capacity for thought is limited to what it thinks it can kill. Its sensitivity to the Force is likely nonexistent. And its lack of fear, with Ren and his Knights brandishing crackling blades, is a mere matter of ignorance on the part of the ecosystem.

With all that said, Ren takes exception to anything which thinks itself stronger than him.

“We take its horns for a trophy.” He glances sidelong at Verix. “After we kill it.” He ignites his saber.

There's no need to speak a word of command. The Knights sense his will and flow forward like a black tide.

The Sryvast comes straight for him, perhaps sensing another apex predator before it. Ren darts to the side, gifting it a deep cut along the side of its face and wheeling to open another down one leg. A clawed forelimb swings at him, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t need to.

The Knights move like pack hunters, unified by the will of their master. A claw swings for Ren, but he pays it no mind – he doesn’t need to. Krobakh’s axe strikes the limb which would be swatting his master, knocking it aside. Torlun’s handcannon is snapping angrily away, going for the Sryvast’s eyes. The rest flow in formation, landing more and more blows to wound the creature, bleed it and lame it.

Verix is the most eager, dancing between its legs, opening a shallow cut with every heartbeat. Gwaelyn is just as swift, and the rest lay into the creature, Ren himself attacking savagely and dealing the deepest wounds.

Perhaps this should have played out as a prolonged, titanic struggle, the Ren as the unstoppable force to an immovable object. The truth, however, is that this object is eminently moveable. The Ren admits no greater threat, no rival at the top of the food chain.

A hundred cuts lame the beast, give its armour a sheen of dark green blood. Ren’s saber burns through bone plate and the flesh beneath, the Sryvast screams in pain. And finally, as its limbs give it, an apex predator gives voice to primal terror.

Ren leaps atop the Sryvast, raising his saber in both hands and stabbing down with a roar. The crackling red blade burrows into bone, hide and flesh. The scream of the monster takes on an existential quality as he plunges the searing saber into its heart, and he feels its bestial vitality ebb away at last. The Dark Side boils around him, acclamation of his fury and the power of the Ren.

His reverie is finally broken by a sibilant hiss from Gwaelyn. “Master?”

Ren’s helmeted head snaps up, eyes on the open gate. “We get what we came for.”

With barely a backward glance, he advances into the ruin, noting the bones of beasts piled in the corners of the hall. In the corridors, which the Sryvast couldn’t reach, there are only the bodies of Kemazad soldiers again, lying where they fell, centuries before the beast made its lair here.

He can sense it now, the ghost of a smell like old blood. Whoever razed this fortress missed something – either that, or they didn’t dare take it with them. As much was hinted in the ancient texts which led Ren and his Knights here.

Ren follows it, the Knights moving in his wake save for Torlun, who prowls ahead with his blaster raised. The affixed torch, Ren’s lightsaber and the blades of the other Knights are the only source of illumination, bloody light washing over dessicated bodies.

“Our prize is ahead,” Torlun rasps over his shoulder as he passes through a shattered doorway, checking the corners. None of them feel a presence other than the one they seek, but there is no complacency here.

“I sense it,” Ren replies. A sensation not unlike hunger stirs within him, in answer to the beckoning presence.

They enter a small antechamber, and it becomes clear that whoever despoiled this place did indeed leave the relic unmolested. It sits on the palm of a carven hand of black stone, glinting ominously. A slender, curved dagger. Its sheath sits upon another stone hand, the two items held as if in supplication.

Jagged characters are engraved upon both the sheath and the silvered blade, and Ren knows enough of the ancient languages to discern promises of power. A ritual blade, used in the shadowed art of blood-rites.

He likes to imagine – though he knows it cannot be so – that this blade was left for him. Less worthy hands shied away, leaving it for one strong enough in mind and spirit to wield it.

He is well aware that this is unlikely to be the case. But no matter. The weapon is his now, and as with every relic he collects, his knowledge will grow. His power will grow. He is already mightier by far than he was as an apprentice, and he will only rise from here. He will eclipse Sidious as surely as he has grown beyond Vader. Kylo Ren will be a name more feared than any prefaced by the Darth title, in time. Greater than all the Sith, unmatched.

But it’s not enough. It will never be enough. Ren turns on his heel and stalks away, the Knights following.


End file.
